What Lawyers Can Do to Boost Their Online Reputation

What Lawyers Can Do to Boost Their Online Reputation

A lawyer plays an important part in the justice system. The case you are involved in, despite whoever may be involved will come into the public eye and be scrutinized. The nature of some of your cases may cause you to suffer under attention you don’t want to have.
You may be working to create a low profile, but it can become difficult to keep your life private once a case starts to become inflammatory. Your reputation may come under fire as people start to hurl accusations and make defamatory statements online. You may need to work to fight against untrue statements online, as well as negative blogs and forum posts. That can take a lot of time and effort, but with that effort, you can boost your online reputation.
A Negative Impact
If there are negative comments out there about you, it can hurt your customers’ perceptions of you.
Internet use is growing everywhere across the world, and people are using it in increasing amounts to find out information before they hire anyone’s services. Your reputation online and the kind of results that show up for your name or practice on a search engine can directly affect how likely someone is to employ your services. Not even lawyers are safe from the effects.
Your potential clients may use a search engine like Google to determine if they wants to hire you. They may also look at previews on a variety of websites. If they start to see much negative information, they may look for help from someone else. As competitive as your industry can be, it becomes even moreso when customers are seeing lots of negative comments about you and your practice.
You should work to maintain a robust online presence, and the internet can help get the word out about your business. Legal professionals are using social network sites more and more, expanding their reach by connecting with your customers and potential clients. If you don’t take advantage of the internet to market your business, then you are missing out on an important opportunity and you are making your business seem less relevant to your clients. You can also add your profile to professional lawyer sites, such as Martindale.com and Avvo.
You should attempt to create a positive presence online. This will help potential clients get the information they are looking for from sources you have created, such as from your website. If you have suffered such severe attacks that people see more negative content about you than positive, and your true presence online is damaged by negative comments and reviews, then you need to take some proactive measures. One of the best things you can do is hire a reputation management firm to handle the situation for you.
Your Ability to Practice Law Will be Severely Hampered
As lawyer, you deal with many clerks, jurors, judges and witnesses. Your reputation defines how those interactions go and in what way they are construed.
A litigation lawyer, for example, may suffer from negative press about him when jurors look up information on him. That kind of negative online presence can cloud their perceptions about him and make them change their opinion of him and the current case. They could be accessing information that should be kept private or untrue statements from disgruntled former customers. Your enemies can also use that information to attack you and hurt your chances of success.
It can actually hurt you to leave a lot of information online about past cases that can colour perception about you. Certain materials have to be kept public as a matter of record, but you can take measures to ensure that they are not easily accessible. If you take part in a very public case, then your name can start popping up frequently on Google searches and other search engines.
If you need to get your online reputation under control, it can help to start by putting privacy back in place. Be sure to be discreet in the way you deal with clients and look at hiring an online management reputation firm to handle your online affairs.
Fix Negative Online Sources
Just knowing what tools are at your disposal and what it takes to preserve and build up your online reputation is a big part of the battle. You can use a number of resources to alert you when negative information or information of any kind is posted about you. Google Alerts lets you know if something is posted that contains certain keywords. If some new instance of that keyword is posted, then the alert will let you know, and you can start to do something about it. It’s never fun to find negative content about you, but you have some ways to deal with that. You can choose to spend lots of time online trying to fix and maintain your reputation.
You can also take action by hiring an online reputation management specialist to fix your reputation for you. You do need to act quickly and decisively, however, if you are going to be successful in repairing your reputation.